LPC810 a little 8 pin DIP ARM MCU

Recently I've got hold of some of NXP's dinky LPC810's. A 32 Bit ARM MCU in a 8 pin dual inline package that cost under £1 individually and less that 33p in quantity. These are incredibly easy to use and can simply be connected directly to a USB serial adapter and programmed via the inbuilt ISP. That is all you need, just 4 wires connecting the serial adapter and another grounding pin 5 on power up in order to switch to the ISP mode. No other components are necessary which makes this device a extremely simple way to get into ARM Cortex M0 programming.

The LPC810 can run up to 30Mhz on its internal RC oscillator and has 4k of flash and 1k of ram. That's not a lot for a 32bit mcu but my initial experiments suggest much can still be done with that. 

As for IO the 6 available pins can be configured for SPI, I2C and UART as well as their default GPIO. There is also a Comparator and a very flexible timer among other goodies.

It's maximum supply voltage is 4.6v but fortunately most of the LPC810's io pins are 5v tolerant. Running @ 30mhz 3.3v it will consume about 3ma for a continuous while loop and much less in its sleep modes.

The free program Flash Magic available from http://www.flashmagictool.com/ can be used to access the ISP functionality erase and program the chip. A simple way to test if you have wired it to the USB uart adapter correctly is to use Flash Magic to find the device ID.

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Now you are ready to program the LPC810 but you will need  a Hex file first. In the Next post I will look at how to create programs for the LPC810.

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